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The Yukos Affair Terminating the Implicit Contract

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The Yukos Affair Terminating the Implicit Contract The Yukos Affair Terminating the Implicit Contract PONARS Policy Memo 307 Vadim Volkov European University at St. Petersburg November 2003 On July 2, 2003, Russian law enforcement arrested billionaire Platon Lebedev, chairman of the Board of Directors of MENATEP, the financial center of the oil giant YUKOS. A few days earlier the police had arrested Alexei Pichugin, the head of the Economic Security Department of the Security Service of YUKOS. The General Procuracy (Russia’s chief law enforcement agency) charged Lebedev with financial fraud, dating back to the privatization of the phosphate-producing plant Apatit in 1993–1994, and with tax evasion by MENATEP subsidiaries in the Tomsk oblast’. Pichugin was charged with much more serious offenses: organizing five contract killings. On October 25, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of YUKOS and one of Russia’s leading oligarchs, was arrested and charged with fraud, tax evasion, and theft. Two days later, Vladimir Putin publicly declined to engage in any bargaining over the activities of law enforcement agencies and abruptly called for an end to all speculation and hysteria around the arrests of YUKOS management. Then, on October 30, the General Procuracy (GP) froze 44 percent of YUKOS stock (the major part of which belongs to Khodorkovsky and his closest associates). The same day Putin accepted the resignation of Alexander Voloshin, the Head of the Administration of the President (AP), and appointed Dmitri Medvedev as his successor. Finally, while still in detention, Khodorkovsky resigned as the Chairman of the Board of Directors of YUKOS. YUKOS is Russia’s largest company in terms of the market value of its assets, second largest in terms of profits, and fourth in sales. As Khodorkovsky once boasted, every sixth car in Russia is refueled by YUKOS. The criminal prosecution against its top management and the search of its offices are signs of a conflict of extraordinary scale. The causes and consequences of the conflict are not clear as the initiators of the YUKOS affair remain in the shadows. YUKOS has been seen as exemplifying Russian big business’ efforts to meet international business standards, and it enjoys the reputation of being a sophisticated and transparent company that pays its taxes; it paid $4.5 billion in taxes to the state coffers in 2002. However, the GP claims Khodorkovsky and his associates misappropriated up to $1 billion from the state. The detention of its management has had negative effects on YUKOS’s capitalization, has increased uncertainty for the rest of the business community, and may well undermine Russia’s economic growth by antagonizing foreign investors. The PROGRAM ON NEW APPROACHES TO RUSSIAN SECURITY VADIM VOLKOV reshuffling of the AP deepened the uncertainty, for it signified the end of the Yeltsin legacy in Russia’s executive power and, possibly, the onset of a different type of politics. So what are the origins of and motivating factors in the assault against YUKOS? Who are the beneficiaries, and what is the rationale for the move against YUKOS? What does it tell us about new state policies and relations between the state and the big business in Russia today? This article, written as the YUKOS crisis was reaching its peak but was still far from conclusion, presents three possible readings of the causes of the conflict: Khodorkovsky’s political ambitions; conflict within the presidential administration; and the mergers and acquisitions policy of YUKOS. It then suggests a general framework for understanding the seemingly arbitrary and risky actions of the GP and concludes that the launching of the YUKOS affair should be viewed as the strengthened state terminating the implicit and informal contract it had with the oligarchs, and proceeding to create an alternative system of relations with business in which formal rules will have more weight. Political Ambitions The oligarchs’ repeated attempts to exert direct political influence have been the source of conflicts with the Kremlin administration since 1996. In 2000 these aspirations were decisively crushed by the criminal prosecutions of Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, as well as by symbolic warnings to other major companies, notably LUKOIL, whose offices were pointedly searched by the tax police. Distanced from public politics, the leaders of big business nonetheless retained informal alliances with senior Kremlin officials and continued to covertly subsidize regional governors and political parties, using regional political alliances to acquire major industrial enterprises. Preceding the first round of YUKOS arrests was the publication on June 9, 2003, of an analytical report entitled “The State and The Oligarchs,” by the Center for the National Strategy (CNS), an allegedly independent think tank. In the opening section it bluntly stated that the oligarchs, having concluded the privatization of Russia’s major economic assets, have now turned to the privatization of Russia’s political space. The institution of the presidency, the report argued, was the major obstacle to the new oligarchic rule. The oligarchic scenario of regime change, according to the report, included giving the Duma additional constitutional powers at the expense of the president. This would be achieved by bringing the major political parties under oligarchic control. The 2003 Duma elections would then bring about a parliamentary majority, and thus a government, controlled by Russia’s oligarchs and acquiescent to their political will. Khodorkovsky was named as the main advocate of this scenario and, accordingly, as the likely head of the new government. A widely publicized charity campaign unleashed by YUKOS in spring 2003 gave some credence to the CNS report, which the mass media occasionally quoted throughout the summer. When Khodorkovsky allegedly donated U.S.$ 70 million to the Communist Party (made, according to media reports, through Alexei Kandaurov, one of the top managers of YUKOS), in addition to his conventional donations to Yabloko and the right-liberal Union of the Right Forces, the case of Khodorkovsky’s political ambitions gained further ‘proof’. The arrest of YUKOS management, including its security service, and the prospects of protracted investigations 2 PROGRAM ON NEW APPROACHES TO RUSSIAN SECURITY VADIM VOLKOV and court hearings will certainly deprive the company of leverage during the election year and can certainly be counted on to send a clear signal to other oligarchs. However, Putin’s directive to the GP to look into the circumstances of the privatization by MENATEP of the Apatit plant (now one of the key charges in the YUKOS case) came as early as December 2002, against the background of another conflict of interest. In the end of 2002, the government and the leaders of the oil industry discussed an eastern oil pipeline route, a key issue of both economic and foreign policy. While Putin and the state-owned oil company Rosneft’ opted for a route through the port of Nakhodka, supplying Russian oil to a range of possible competing consumers in southeast Asia, YUKOS lobbied for a Datsyn route leading to China and linking YUKOS oil fields directly to the single largest Asian oil market. The YUKOS option stressed the economic efficiency side of the pipeline project but left out state foreign policy interests attached, as usual, to oil pipelines. Khodorkovsky’s criticism of Rosneft’ and his aspiration to privatize pipeline policy antagonized both state officials and a segment of business elite. Conflict Within the Presidential Administration The clashes between two elite groups within the presidential administration—between the Kremlin veterans and the newcomers who arrived from St. Petersburg with Putin—have become the new political myth. The arrival of people from the power ministries at key positions in the power vertical built by Putin has been documented (see, for example, PONARS Policy Memo 284). The tensions and conflicts within the presidential administration, the most influential center of power in Russia today, are, according to this scenario, kept secret. The YUKOS affair has thus been widely analyzed within the context of this internal conflict. From 1996 to 1999, the Yeltsin administration aided the rise of YUKOS, Sibneft’, Siberian Aluminum, and Alfa to dominant positions in business and protected their further expansion that proceeded through multiple enterprise takeovers during the first years of Putin’s presidency. The old Kremlin part of the presidential administration, whose leading figure was Voloshin, may be regarded as the protection agency for the oligarchs and the oligarch’s business interests. The oligarchs, in turn, as a source not only of taxes but also of informal rents, provided vital resources for the reproduction of the dominant political position of the presidential administration. The alliance between Russia’s largest business groups and the old Kremlin element of the presidential administration may indeed be seen as the key to the endurance of Yeltsin’s legacy in both the presidential administration and in the government. The new Putin security team, comprised of the two deputy heads of the presidential administration, Igor Sechin and Viktor Ivanov, and the Federal Security Service’s head of the Department for Economic Crimes Yurii Zaostrovtsev (none of whom ever appear in public), and the chief of the Federal Security Service (FSB), reportedly stand behind the assault on YUKOS. Their aim then is to overpower their rival faction within the presidential administration by undermining its resource base and demonstrating to the oligarchs that the old Kremlin faction can no longer provide efficient protection. This reading makes very good sense in Russia simply because it mirrors the norms and tactics 3 PROGRAM ON NEW APPROACHES TO RUSSIAN SECURITY VADIM VOLKOV of the wild capitalism of the 1990s, when organizations that managed coercion and offered private protection were often at war, undermining each others’ credibility and competing for clients. Voloshin’s resignation, then, is the sign that the old Kremlin ‘roof’ (krysha, or protection) is now defunct.
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